Swallowed by the Sea! …Keta’s coastal lines, landmarks, efforts to preserve heritage

 The Atlantic Ocean is no longer a distant blue horizon for the people of Keta.

It now circles around their doorsteps, uninvited, unrelent­ing, pulling down walls and other structures, erasing memories, and threatening lives.

Hovering precariously between the restless sea and the Keta Lagoon, this once-thriving coastal town is slowly being obliterated.

Salt water has become both a physical and metaphorical threat, dissolving the town’s past as fast as it claims its future.

Madam Aku Atitso, 62, lives in a crumbling former Prisons Service quarters – one of the few struc­tures still standing on the eroded stretch of Queen Street.

She sits quietly at the entrance, preparing a modest breakfast for herself and her granddaughter.

The air is thick with salt and silence. “The sea took everything,” she says softly. “My husband’s nets, our mattress, our memories all gone overnight.” Her voice trem­bles. “This place too is dying. But it’s the last place with a roof over my head.”

A few metres away, Aunty Esi­nam, 79, watches the sea from a low stool beside a wooden shelter. Her eyes do not blink. “That spot,” she points, “used to be someone’s living room, a whole family lived there”.

It’s not just homes that are van­ishing. Landmarks that anchored Keta’s cultural identity are dis­appearing one after another. The once-imposing Fort Prinzenstein, a haunting relic of the transatlantic slave trade is now more of a ruin than a monument.

The colonial-era Bremen factory, the old cinema where generations of children once laughed at flick­ering black-and-white films is also gone.

Queen Street, once the town’s bustling backbone, is now a watery corridor choked with debris.

Standing atop a section of the sea defence wall, 69-year-old retired teacher Efo Kwasi Agbeko surveys what remains.

“The first police station is mostly gone,” he says, gesturing part of the building stuck in the sea sand, only ruins and a few rooms remain.

“This town is fighting, but the sea is winning,” he said.

Even the Cape St. Paul Light­house, Keta’s historic sentinel, leans perilously toward the water, and fishermen say holes in the shore are opening more frequently, sometimes every week.

That leaves a thick cloud of uncertainty hanging around the historic town of Keta.

Once upon a time, it was a vi­brant town noted for business but currently left with ruins with a few of the residents watching in awe the sea’s devastation.

From: Geoffrey Kwame Buta, Keta, Volta Region